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How Pro Kabaddi's Auction Turns Raiders Into Crorepatis
When the gavel came down on the Pro Kabaddi auction for Season 12 over the last weekend of May, twelve franchises had spent close to ₹37.9 crore in two days, and ten players walked away as crorepatis. To a casual viewer, kabaddi is still the schoolyard game of holding your breath and tagging opponents. Behind the mat, though, sits a bidding system as intricate as anything in the IPL — with its own purse limits, player tiers and a buy-back card that can change a team's whole plan in seconds.
If you have ever watched the numbers scroll across the screen and wondered why a raider you have never heard of suddenly costs more than a flat in Pune, this is how the money actually moves.
How the Pro Kabaddi auction sets the price
Every franchise walks in with the same starting wallet: a salary purse of ₹5 crore. That figure is not pure spending money. Anything a team has already locked into retained players gets carved out first, so two teams sitting at the same auction can have very different amounts left to fight with.
Players are slotted into categories — A, B, C and D — before bidding begins. The category fixes a player's base price, the floor from which bidding opens. Top-tier names sit at a base of around ₹30 lakh, while younger or less-proven players start at a few lakh. The category is a starting gun, not a verdict: a Category C player who had a breakout season can blow past Category A names once teams start raising paddles.
The auction runs player by player, lot by lot. A franchise has to balance star power against squad depth, because that ₹5 crore has to cover an entire roster, not just a marquee signing.
The FBM card: how teams keep their stars
The most strategic wrinkle is the Final Bid Match, or FBM. Think of it as a right of refusal. A team releases a player into the pool, lets the open market decide his worth, and then — if it chooses — matches the winning bid to snatch him back at that exact price.
The clever part is how many of these cards a team gets. The number is tied to how many Elite Retained Players (ERPs) a franchise locked in before the auction:
- Retain 6 ERPs and you get 1 FBM card
- Retain 5 ERPs and you get 2 FBM cards
- Retain 4 or fewer and you get 3 FBM cards
In other words, the more you hold onto upfront, the fewer second chances you get on the floor. Teams that go into the auction lighter, trusting the market, are handed more flexibility to claw players back. It forces a genuine choice between certainty and freedom.
This season, franchises used FBM to retain players for either one or two seasons, turning a single card into a longer planning tool. Used well, it lets a team look relaxed while a rival drives up the price, then simply match and walk away with its own man.
Where the big money landed this year
Season 12's headline number belonged to Mohammadreza Shadloui, the Iranian all-rounder, who went to Gujarat Giants for ₹2.23 crore off a base price of just ₹30 lakh. Right behind him was Devank Dalal, the previous season's best raider, picked up by Bengal Warriorz for ₹2.205 crore.
Neither of those, though, beats the league's all-time mark. That still belongs to Pawan Sehrawat, whose ₹2.605 crore deal in the Season 10 auction remains the ceiling no one has cracked. The fact that a single raider's price has hovered around the ₹2.6 crore line for three seasons tells you the league has found its rough valuation for a generational match-winner.
The broader signal is the depth of money. Ten players crossing the ₹1 crore mark in one auction would have been unthinkable in the league's early years, when most contracts were modest and a handful of names carried the wage bill.
Why raiders out-earn defenders
Look down any list of the priciest buys and a pattern jumps out: raiders dominate. Defenders, the men who actually win tight matches by shutting down a star raider, rarely top the chart.
The reason is partly how kabaddi scores. A raider piles up visible, countable points every time he crosses the line and comes back. A corner defender's best work — a perfectly timed ankle hold — is one moment that the scoreboard rewards modestly. Franchises, broadcasters and fans all gravitate to the player whose contribution looks bigger.
There is a market logic to it too. A genuinely elite raider can carry a struggling team to the playoffs almost single-handedly, so teams pay a premium for that ceiling. The smartest franchises quietly load up on defenders in the middle price bands, knowing a settled defensive unit wins titles even if it never tops an auction.
The pipeline: New Young Players and the future
Not every name in the room is a known quantity. The league protects its talent pipeline through the New Young Player (NYP) pool — uncapped, often regional players who enter on controlled terms so franchises can take a punt without burning their full purse.
This matters because kabaddi's talent base is rural and deep. A teenager from a Haryana akhada or a Maharashtra village ground can go from district tournaments to a televised contract in a single cycle. The NYP route is the on-ramp, and several of today's expensive raiders arrived that way only a few seasons ago.
For the league, launched in 2014 and now running 12 teams, this churn is the point. Fresh faces keep wages from being captured by a closed club of veterans, and they give franchises a reason to scout the domestic circuit hard.
What to watch when you read an auction
If you want to follow the next auction like an insider rather than a spectator, track these things:
- How many ERPs each team retained — it tells you how many FBM cards they hold and how aggressive they can afford to be.
- Which base-price category a surprise buy came from — a Category C or D player going big is a scouting bet worth noticing.
- Whether a team is stacking raiders or quietly building a defence — the title usually goes to the latter.
- The gap between the top buy and the tenth-most-expensive — a narrow gap means money is spreading, a sign the talent pool is deepening.
The Pro Kabaddi auction has quietly become one of Indian sport's better-run marketplaces — disciplined purse, clear tiers, a buy-back card that rewards nerve. The next time a raider's price rockets past two crore, you will know it is not chaos. It is a system doing exactly what it was built to do: putting a number on a held breath.
